By the beginning of 1920 skyrocketing inflation and Wilson's focus upon his proposed League of Nations at the expense of domestic policy had helped make the incumbent President very unpopular[1] – besides which Wilson also had major health problems that had left First Lady Edith effectively running the nation. Political unrest seen in the Palmer Raids and the "Red Scare" further added to the unpopularity of the Democratic Party, since this global political turmoil produced considerable fear of alien revolutionaries invading the country.[2] Demand in the West for exclusion of Asian immigrants became even stronger than it had been before,[3] and the factionalism that would almost destroy the Democratic Party later in the decade had already simmered.[4]

Resultant opposition to the Democrats allowed Warren Harding to win the election in Arizona with 55.91 percent of the vote to James Cox' 43.72 percent. This was the first Republican presidential victory in Arizona as a whole, and in all but three of the state's fourteen contemporary counties: Pima County, which Charles Evans Hughes had won in 1916, Graham County, where no Republican would win until Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, and Greenlee County, which no Republican would carry until George W. Bush in 2000.[5]